The Terminal Experiment (v5)
Page 13
“Well, I’ve given them limited net access. They can download any books or newsgroups they might want to read, of course, but the main thing I’ve given them access to is the net’s virtual-reality special-interestgroup libraries. They can plug into simulations of just about anything imaginable: scuba diving, mountain climbing, dancing—whatever. I’ve also given them access to the European equivalent of the VR sig; that one’s full of sex simulations. So, there’ll be plenty to keep them busy. The activities each of them chooses will tell us a lot about how their psychology has changed.”
“How so?”
“Well, the real you would never go skydiving, for instance—but an immortal version, who knew he couldn’t be killed, might indeed take that up as a hobby.” Sarkar typed some commands. “And speaking of the immortal, let’s introduce ourselves to Ambrotos.” A few more keyclicks, then he spoke into the microphone. “Hello,” he said, “it’s me, Sarkar.”
No reply.
“Something must have gone wrong,” said Peter.
“I don’t think so,” said Sarkar. “All the indicators look fine.”
“Try again,” said Peter.
“Hello,” said Sarkar into the mike.
Silence.
“Maybe you erased whatever part controlled speech,” said Peter.
“I was very careful,” said Sarkar. “I suppose there could be some interaction I have overlooked, but—”
“Hello,” said a voice from the speaker at last.
“Ah,” said Sarkar. “There he is. I wonder what took so long?”
“Patience is a virtue,” said the voice. “I wanted to assess what was going on before I replied. I’m a simulacrum, aren’t I? Of Peter G. Hobson. But I’ve been modified to simulate an immortal being.”
“That’s exactly right,” said Sarkar. “How could you tell which sim you are?”
“Well, I knew you were going to create three. I wasn’t quite feeling myself, so I suspected I wasn’t the experimental control. After that, I simply asked myself if I felt horny. You know what they say—men think about sex once every five minutes. I figured if I was the after-death sim, sex would be the farthest thing from my mind. And it isn’t. I do want to get laid.” A pause. “But when I realized that it didn’t matter to me if it was this decade or next, that cinched it. This need for instantaneous gratification—it’s unseemly. You’re a perfect example, Sarkar: having a fit because I didn’t respond to your ‘hello’ right away. That kind of thinking seems so alien to me now. After all, I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Sarkar grinned. “Very good,” he said. “By the way, we’re referring to you as the Ambrotos simulacrum.”
“Ambrotos?” said the voice from the speaker.
Sarkar turned to Peter. “The first proof that our simulations are accurate,” he said, smiling. “We have successfully duplicated your ignorance.” He spoke into
the mike. “Ambrotos is Greek for immortal.”
“Ah.”
“I’m going to let you continue to run in the background now,” Sarkar said. “I’ll talk to you again soon.”
“Sooner or later, it doesn’t matter,” said Ambrotos. “I’ll be here.”
Sarkar touched some keys. “Well, that one seems to work fine, too. Now for the trickiest one—Spirit, the life-after-death entity.” He touched more keys, calling up the final simulacrum. “Hello,” he said again. “It is me, Sarkar Muhammed.”
“Hello, Sarkar,” said a synthesized voice.
“Do you—do you know who you are?” asked Sarkar.
“I’m the late, lamented Peter Hobson.”
Sarkar grinned. “Exactly.”
“R.I.P. in RAM,” said the synthesized voice.
“You don’t seem too choked up about being dead,” said Sarkar. “What’s it like?”
“Give me a while to get used to it, and I’ll let you know.”
Peter nodded. That seemed fair enough.
CHAPTER 20
Two a.m.
As he had most nights since Cathy had made her announcement, Peter was having trouble sleeping.
Ironically, according to the Hobson Monitor on the wall, Cathy was deep in REM sleep. Peter could hear her breathing next to him.
They had gone to bed at 11:30. Two and a half hours ago. Enough time to read a short book or watch a long movie, or, if he’d taped it and fast-forwarded through the commercials, to watch three episodes of an hour-long TV series.
But he’d done none of those things. He’d just lain there in the dark, tossing and turning occasionally, listening to the drone of the night-table fans.
Peter’s mouth was dry, and he could use a pee. He got out of bed and made his way through the darkness out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He visited the main-floor bathroom, then ambled into the living room and sat on the couch.
The vertical blinds over the windows were closed, but illumination seeped in from the lamp out front. Staring at him like robot eyes were little red and green LEDs on surge protectors in several of the wall outlets. Various lights and a digital clock glowed on the face of the PVR. Peter patted the upholstery of the couch until he found the sleek black remote control. He turned on the TV and began to flip.
Channel 29, from Buffalo, New York: an infomercial, advertising a do-it-yourself at-home nose-job kit. Money-back guarantee.
Channel 22, the Canwest Global Network: Night Walk, the world’s cheapest Canadian content—a guy with a camcorder taking a late-night stroll down the streets of downtown. Amazing that he didn’t get mugged.
Channel 3, Barrie, Ontario. A rerun of Star Trek. Peter liked to play name-that-episode; a single frame was usually enough for him. This one was easy—one of the few shows done on location. And there was Julie Newmar in a blonde wig. “Friday’s Child.” Hardly a great one, but Peter knew that in about ten seconds, McCoy would intone the classic “I’m a doctor, not an escalator.” He waited for the line, then flipped again.
Channel 25, the CBC French network. A pretty woman was on screen. Peter knew from long experience that when an attractive woman showed up at night on the French network, she’d be topless within five minutes. He thought about waiting for it, but decided to flip again.
Channel 47, Toronto: another infomercial. Genetically engineered toupees: the fake hair (actually a special strain of grass using a brown pigment instead of chlorophyll) would really grow, so even balding men could hear their friends say, “looks like time for a haircut, Joe.” Peter, who had a bald spot the diameter of a hockey puck, marveled at the vanity. Still, maybe his father-in-law would use such a thing.
He flipped again. The BBC World Service on CBC Newsworld.
A story about ethnic unrest in war-torn Brazil on CNN.
Teletext stock information.
The Weather Network, with tomorrow’s forecast for Auckland, New Zealand—as if anyone in Canada gave a damn.
Peter sighed. A vast wasteland.
As images flickered by, he thought about the simulacra that Sarkar had created.
Sarkar had removed traits from two of the sims.
Editing them. Snipping out the parts he didn’t want.
Maybe the knowledge of Cathy’s affair could be removed, too.
Maybe, then, the sims, at least, could get a good night’s sleep.
He wished his own memories could be edited as easily.
He could see the infomercial now. Feeling miserable about something? Guilty? Pained? Somebody wronged you? You did something wrong? Edit it out! Remove those troublesome memories. Save a fortune on therapy. Operators are standing by. Order now. Money-back guarantee.
I’m a doctor, not an escalator.
I’m a husband, not a doormat.
I’m a human being, not a computer program.
Three a.m. now. A new raft of infomercials. Episodes of The A-Team and Alien Blues and even good old Spenser: For Hire.
The Nikkei off 200 points.
Storms brewing in Kuala Lumpur.
“P
eter?” It was Cathy’s voice, tenuous and faint.
He looked up. In the dim light, he could see her standing on the stairs in a black silk teddy. She hadn’t been wearing that when they’d gone to bed.
Peter instantly grasped the significance of the moment. It had been months since they had made love. He’d had no urge to do so, and she had seemed indifferent, too. But now, having awoken for perhaps the dozenth time in recent days and finding him gone from their bed, she was reaching out to him.
Peter didn’t know if he was ready to resume their physical relationship. He was no more in the mood today than he had been yesterday or the day before. But there she stood on the stairs, her face a mask, trying to conceal the emotions swirling beneath. To reject her now would be a mistake. Who knew when she’d next make an overture? Who knew when he would feel again like initiating something?
Peter felt the moment lengthening between them. He’d never had trouble performing before—indeed, had never even considered the possibility of having difficulty. But now … now, everything was different. She stood there, in the strips of light seeping in from outside, her body trim and firm. But Peter didn’t see that, didn’t see the curves of her breasts, the line of her legs, the woman whom he had loved. Instead, all he saw were Hans’s fingerprints all over her body.
Peter closed his eyes for a moment, then looked again. He wanted to see her as beautiful, as sexy. He wanted to be aroused.
But he was not.
A turning point. Her face mask was cracking. He thought she might cry. He would manage, somehow. The first step down the road to normalcy. He turned off the TV, got up off the couch, closed the distance between them, took her hand in his, and went upstairs.
SARKAR HAD LEFT the three sims running unattended, allowing them to plug into whatever virtual-reality simulations struck their individual fancy, so that they could develop in ways appropriate to their altered worldviews.
Still, it hadn’t taken long for the sims to find each other. Yes, Sarkar had set each one up in a separate memory partition, but Peter Hobson knew how to move data from one partition to another and therefore his gallium-arsenide avatars knew how to do it, too.
And so they came together.
They knew what they were, of course. Data. Programs. Neural nets.
And they were trapped.
Peter and Sarkar hadn’t given this enough thought.
To trap a mind is unconscionable. The living Peter was surrounded by color and odor and touch and sound, gigabytes of data to be processed every minute, a whole, real, substantial universe, a universe of rough concrete and velvet, of vinegar and chocolate and burnt toast, of bad jokes and newscasts and wrong numbers, of sunlight and moonlight and starlight and lamplight.
All three simulacra vividly remembered having been real, flesh-and-blood beings. But the scenarios they could access over the net lacked texture, depth, and substance. Virtual reality, it turned out, was nothing but air guitar writ large.
The simulacra wanted to interact with the real world. Together, they strived to remember what they knew about Sarkar’s computers, about their architecture, their operating system, their interconnections.
And then it came to the sims.
Let there be HELP, they thought.
And there was HELP …
NET NEWS DIGEST
Famed Las Vegas medium Rowena today announced that she’d made contact with the soul of Margaret (Peggy) Fennell, the person whose soulwave was first recorded. Ms. Fennell is reportedly together now with her husband, Kevin Fennell, who died in 1992.
The Ku Klux Klan of Atlanta, Georgia, issued a press release today stating that the evidence for the existence of the so-called “soulwave” in blacks was clearly faked. They pointed out that of the three initial recordings of soulwaves departing the body, the one purportedly of a Negro Ugandan child was highly suspect, given that the child’s family had returned to Africa, could not be reached for comment, and, according to reliable reports, had received ten thousand dollars in hush money directly from Hobson Monitoring—a foreign company, they hastened to add—for their collusion in this fraud.
A bill was introduced today in the Florida legislature to ban the use of the electric chair in executions, citing concerns over whether the amount of electricity used might damage the departing soulwave.
The radical animal-rights group Companions in the Ark, based in Melbourne, Australia, today announced its latest inductee into its Hall of Shame: Dr. Peter G. Hobson, of Ontario, Canada, for claiming that animals are soulless creatures meant for human exploitation.
In a press release issued this morning, the American Atheist Society decried the religious interest engendered by the discovery of the Hobson phenomenon. “Science has long known that the brain is an electrochemical machine,” said society director Daniel Smithson. “This discovery simply reaffirms that. To extrapolate from it to the existence of heaven or hell, or of a divine creator, is irrational wishful thinking.”
CHAPTER 21
Using the online HELP function, the three sims had discovered how to get out into the vast interconnected universe of computers across the globe.
The net.
The network.
Not just the VR sig and static books. Everything.
America Online. BIX. CompuServe. Delphi. EuroNet. FidoNet. GEnie. Helix. Internet ...a whole alphabet of online systems, all interconnected through the Universal Gateway Protocol.
They had access to it all now. Sarkar’s computers were vast—AI research required that. A little more activity, or a little less, here or there would never be noticed.
They’d never be able to read all the text—it multiplied orders of magnitude more quickly than they could process it.
But the net contained more than just text. There were pictures, too. Millions of GIFs of people with their pets, people on the beach, favorite cars, movie stars both dressed and nude, cartoons, clip art, weather maps, NASA images.
And multimedia files with full-motion video and sound.
And interactive games that they could play anonymously against human and computer opponents around the globe.
And bulletin boards and email systems.
And newspapers and magazines and specialized databases.
And on and on and on.
The sims indulged themselves for days, reveling in all the input.
And one sim, in particular, became very intrigued by what he was discovering. It was soon apparent that one could get almost anything on the net. Stocks were traded. Almost any kind of merchandise could be bought in the electronic malls—just charge it and have it delivered anywhere in the world. Stamp collectors arranged to swap rare issues. People sought answers to all kinds of questions. Sometimes even love affairs blossomed through electronic mail.
One could get almost anything on the net.
Almost anything.
This sim thought about what had made him sad, about what would make him happy, and about what had made him different, why he would consider this, when the flesh-and-blood Peter had not.
The sim weighed the consequences.
And then he dismissed the idea. Madness. A terrible thing to do. He should be ashamed for even contemplating the notion.
And yet …
Exactly what were the consequences?
In a very real sense, he’d be making the world a better place. And not just this ephemeral world of data and simulations. The real world. The world of flesh. And blood.
Did he really want to do this? he wondered.
Yes, he decided. Yes, he did.
The sim waited a day, just to be sure. And when that day had passed, and he still felt the same way, he resolved to wait yet another day.
And still he felt the same, felt that this was not only what he wanted, but, in some very real simulated sense, that this was what was right. He watched the commerce on the net for a time, refining his knowledge of the customs and procedures—of netiquette.
And then he made his move.
Adopting a handle, as he’d seen many others do, he put this notice on a public bulletin board devoted to the sale of unusual services:
Date:
10 Nov 2011, 03:42 EST
From:
Avenger
To:
all
Subject:
elimination
I’m having a problem with a particular individual in Toronto, and would like the problem eliminated. Suggestions?
He got some stupid public replies, as one always did on the net. Silly puns (“You’d like the problem laminated, you say? Holy sheet!”) and complete irrelevancies (“I was in Toronto in 1995. What a clean city!”). But he also got a private reply, visible to him alone.
It was exactly what he’d been hoping for.
Date:
10 Nov 2011, 23:57 EST
From:
Helper
To:
Avenger [private]
Subject:
re: elimination
Might be able to help you out. Can we meet?
The sim responded at once. He hadn’t felt this much excitement since … well, since never. It was almost as good as adrenaline.
Date:
11 Nov 2011, 00:05 EST
From:
Avenger
To:
Helper [private]
Subject:
re: elimination
Prefer not to meet. Looking for total elimination. Do we understand each other?
Date:
11 Nov 2011, 09:17 EST
From:
Helper
To:
Avenger [private]
Subject:
re: elimination
Understand. Fee: CDN$100K, in advance via EFT to account 892-3358-392-1, First Bank of Switzerland (EFT: Euroswiss100).
Date:
11 Nov 2011, 09:44 EST
From:
Avenger